However, her last scuba trip had taken her to a depth of one hundred and thirty feet. The shipwreck dive had required a specialized training course that both Ella Mae and her then-husband, Sloane, had passed with flying colors. Because it was their first deep dive, the couple hadn’t been allowed to spend much time on the wreck, but the dive had gone smoothly and Ella Mae wasn’t afraid to dive down another twenty feet tonight. She had something else to fear. Ella Mae knew she’d have to follow the same meticulous procedures that she’d learned in her deep-water course, including the addition of multiple decompression stops during her ascent. The thought of stopping to eliminate nitrogen from her system while being hunted by a giant crocodile was more than a little unsettling, but getting the bends or losing consciousness would be fatal, so Ella Mae calculated her stops and then checked the equipment she’d taken from the fire station for the third time. After loading everything into her Jeep, she headed back to Partridge Hill.
